In an NFL season that has been all about the powerhouse teams, we have yet to see any of the favorites get knocked out… yet. That will change, however, on Sunday evening when the Bills host the Ravens in Buffalo. These are team Nos. 1 and 4 in the Elo ratings1 and Nos. 2-3 in my SRS ratings. By any standard, either could win the Super Bowl next month — but one will see its season conclude early no matter what happens.
That’s kind of a bummer, whether for fans of the team who loses or just football followers in general. It’s a numbers game, though: The structure of the conferences and the playoff bracket happened to shake out so that three of this year’s Big Five teams are in the AFC with two in the NFC.
The latter pair — the Eagles and Lions — could (and probably will, with a 57 percent chance) meet in the conference title game. The AFC title game will likely also feature two of the Big Five teams, with only a 31 percent chance that the Texans crash the AFC party by knocking off the two-time defending champion Chiefs:
Both the Bills and Ravens can’t be there, though. The upshot of this is that, while we lose a Super Bowl quality team early, we get a Super Bowl-style matchup early as well. In fact, this is one of the best Divisional Round matchups in NFL history on paper — if not the best.
We can look at this using the pregame Elo ratings of the two teams. (For the purposes of this story, we’ll be using the unadjusted base version of Elo from now on, to put everything on equal footing historically.) Both Baltimore (1719) and Buffalo (1706) check in with ratings over 1705, which is actually above the historical average pregame rating for a Super Bowl team (1702).
How rare is it to see a Divisional Round game where both teams went in with a 1705 rating or higher? In all of pro football history, it’s only happened twice before — and one happened before the AFL-NFL merger, so your mileage may vary on whether that counts or not.
The AFL version came in 1968, when the Raiders (1721 Elo) and Chiefs (1709) faced off for the right to face the New York Jets in the AFL title game. Together, the teams had a combined record of 24-4 during the regular season, and just like Buffalo and Baltimore, they had the two best SRS ratings in the “conference” ahead of the game. This looked like a showdown for the ages… but the host Raiders opened up a 21-0 lead in the first quarter, then rattled off the final 20 points of the game to close out a 41-6 thrashing.
(Let’s hope that lopsided outcome doesn’t repeat itself on Sunday!)
But that wasn’t really the NFL playoffs as we know them. The other case came in 1974, when the Raiders and Dolphins faced in a more proper conception of the Divisional playoffs. And that game was indeed a contest for the ages — you know it’s good when it gets its own moniker (the “Sea of Hands” game).
I’ve written before about how that game ended a three-peat bid for the Dolphins, but it’s worth watching the highlights again just for the back-and-forth tension that led to some absolute craziness at the very end. We would be lucky if Bills-Ravens ends up the same way (and certainly Buffalo has had some similar thrillers in recent playoffs past).
And the thing is, this year’s Divisional battle looks ever-so-slightly better on paper. The higher-rated Ravens have a better Elo than the higher-rated Raiders did; the Bills are also very slightly ahead of the Dolphins. There’s a good case to be made that this Buffalo-Baltimore game is the greatest true Divisional matchup ever.
Along those lines, this would also be among the best Super Bowl matchups in history — if it were possible for these teams to face off at that stage of the playoffs. (Which it obviously isn’t.) Only eight Super Bowls in history have seen both teams enter with a pregame Elo rating as high as both teams have in this Bills-Ravens game:
All of which is to say, we’re sort of getting multiple Super Bowls for the price of one in these playoffs. The first will come Sunday, with this Ravens-Bills tilt; then, we may potentially get three more (!) in the form of a possible Lions-Eagles NFC title game, a possible AFC title game with the Chiefs against the Buffalo-Baltimore winner — and then, of course, the actual Super Bowl itself.
The Rams, Texans and Commanders do have something to say about this as well, and they might avert some of those potential pre-Super Bowl “Super Bowls”. But we know at least one is locked in for this Sunday, and here’s hoping it’s an instant classic.
Filed under: NFL, Football Bytes
With adjusted weighting for Week 18, as I outlined here.
I really expected it to be the Buffalo-KC 13 seconds game in the divisional round of 2021. Going into that game felt like the Super Bowl (although neither team even made it there thanks to the Bengals)
I'm not on board with the dig at the AFL!